Ska is dead; long live ska.
The upbeat musical genre, most recently popular in the mid-1990s, has been pronounced moribund more times than a half-drowned cat, only to stir back to life when no one’s paying attention.
According to Rob “Bucket” Hingley, founder of stateside ska pioneers the Toasters, it’s not ska that waxes and wanes but the public’s awareness of it.
“The people that prognosticate that ska is dead are the same people that didn’t realize it was alive in the first place,” said Hingley. “It’s been here all along, but people notice it more when it’s in the charts. You’ll find that sooner or later it’s going to be back up there again in another guise.”
The Toasters, America’s oldest ska band at 25 years and counting, are touting a revival of the genre as part of their Winter Ska Brawl tour, which brings them to Denver on Sunday with cohorts Westbound Train, Satori and Autonomous Collective.
Rangley insists that the Toasters, which he founded in 1981 after moving from London to New York to manage a comic-book shop, just happen to be one of the longest-running examples of the genre, not an exception.
The origins of ska date to early-1960s Jamaica, where musicians sifted the static-laden jazz and R&B broadcasts drifting over from America through calypso, horns and clipped chords. The genre prefigured reggae with its dance-friendly emphasis on accented piano and guitar rhythms on the upbeats.
A second wave of ska broke in late-’70s England when early punk rock sunk its teeth in, creating the 2 Tone scene typified by such biracial groups as the Specials and the English Beat. The third wave hit a decade later and continued through the ’90s with bands like Mighty Mighty Bosstones, No Doubt, Less Than Jake and Mustard Plug grabbing the torch from their forebears and selling millions of albums.
The Toasters have adroitly weathered ska’s popularity cycles through a series of structural and creative adaptations, releasing 15 albums and playing more than 4,000 shows internationally, some in countries that don’t even exist anymore.
“It’s become trans-generational in the sense that people are bringing their kids to see the shows now,” said Hingley. “The worst thing really was having to explain to my mother how I had a wife and three kids and a mortgage, and she’s still asking me when I’m going to get a real job.”
If Hingley’s mother paid more attention she wouldn’t need to worry. In addition to the Toasters, Hingley has founded two successful, influential record labels to disseminate the sounds he loves. His first imprint, Moon Ska Records, grew into the largest independent ska label in the world before consolidating to a European-only operation. His current enterprise, Megalith Records, maintains offices in the U.S. and Europe with a roster of 25 bands.
Though they only cracked No.8 on the Billboard charts with their 1997 platter “Don’t Let the … Grind You Down,” the Toasters aren’t looking for mainstream recognition. The band’s ability to thrive outside MTV’s sphere is a key to its longevity. Turning down a major label contract from Polygram a few years ago may sound like career suicide, but to Hingley it was an expression of artistic freedom.
“What you have to understand about the music business is that sometimes it’s good to be a big fish in a small pond,” he said. “When you get to a certain level, the industry is run by lawyers and accountants and all the creativity’s squeezed out. These people wouldn’t know a hit record if you smacked them in the face with it.”
Hingley’s willingness to adjust to digital forms of distribution and promotion like iTunes and Myspace.com is another key to the Toasters’ endurance. He finds technology’s effects on music to be as ironically cyclical as mainstream tastes.
“With (iTunes) the industry is going back to a singles model like the ’60s,” he said. “So we’ve decided to distribute our new songs on CDBaby.com and Myspace, where we can actually get our singles out and really take advantage of modern media.”
If that strategy allows the Toasters to endure another few years, it won’t surprise Hingley or his fans.
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-820-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
The Toasters
SKA | Bluebird Theater, 3317 E. Colfax Ave.; 7 p.m. Sunday, with Westbound Train, Satori and Autonomous
Collective | $10 | nipp.com
